Sylvia Snowden

Sylvia Snowden’s (B. 1942, Raleigh, NC) command of chromatic range, from dark and earthy tones to the vibrant and artificial, is the fuel of her expressionistic style. The voluminous figures Snowden depicts, often contrapposto, are surrounded by peaks of shifting chroma in a physical manifestation of feeling: the tensions and intensity of life, and the troubled, optimistic, and dramatic elements of our sublime existence. Snowden’s works encapsulate the psychological essence of her subjects – some of whom she knew only in passing, others with whom she had intimate or long-term relationships – and in her works their triumphs, paranoia, agony, and anger are all laid bare.

Sylvia Snowden holds both B.A. and M.A. degrees from Howard University (Washington, DC), earned in 1963 and 1965 respectively, where she studied with David C. Driskell and Lois Maillou Jones. In 1962, Snowden traveled to France with a cohort of fellow Howard University art students and earned a certificate of completion from Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Paris, FR). Later, in 1964, Snowden received a scholarship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME). Snowden has taught at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Howard University (Washington, DC), and Yale University (New Haven, CT), and has served as an artist-in-residence, a panelist, visiting artist, lecturer/instructor, and curator in universities, galleries, and art schools in the United States and internationally. In 2018, Snowden’s work was notably featured in the landmark exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960-Today at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, DC) alongside fellow Howard University alumnae Mildred Thompson, Alma Thomas, and Mary Louise Lovelace; in 2023, London’s Whitechapel Gallery hosted Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 inclusive of work by Snowden; the exhibition, inclusive of Snowden’s work, traveled through spring 2024 to Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (Arles, FR) and Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Bielefeld, DE). Snowden has also exhibited at the Rubell Museum DC (Washington, DC), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ), Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC) Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY), and the National Archives for Black Women's History (NABWH) of the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site (MAMC) (Washington, DC). Snowden’s works are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Rubell Museum (Washington, DC / Miami, FL), Fitzwilliam Museum at University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK), and the Rachofsky Collection (Dallas, TX), among others.

Sylvia Snowden is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery.